Robert Causey: 01:53
Indeed. Indeed. But we British, we drink a lot of tea, and so we can use that.
Colt Knight: 01:58
Tea, though. Yeah. But I gotta admit, though, your hot teas are way better than our Lipton
Robert Causey: 02:04
teas. True. Harrogate, Taylors of Harrogate is my favorite. Because I was born in Harrogate, in fact, and that’s where the best tea seems to come from via India somehow. But Harrogate tea is my favorite.
Colt Knight: 02:20
I mean, you guys didn’t conquer the world for nothing.
Robert Causey: 02:23
I wouldn’t say we didn’t quite conquer the world. I think America was sort of something we didn’t conquer, but we
Colt Knight: 02:32
You had it going on pretty good there for a while.
Robert Causey: 02:34
Yeah. Perhaps.
Colt Knight: 02:37
So I asked Dr. Causey to come on the podcast today. We were thinking, what topic could we possibly cover? You know, we went over his life history. We went over the horse program at the university. You know, what else is there to talk about?
Colt Knight: 02:51
Well, Dr. Causey has got a DVM, so he’s a doctor of veterinary medicine. He also has a PhD. I assume that’s in reproductive physiology, or is it in something else?
Robert Causey: 03:02
Well, technically, it’s in microbiology and infection, but I sort of slanted it towards horses and slanted it towards infections in the horse’s uterus. So that was my claim to fame. I wouldn’t say claim to fame, but at least it’s my claim to something. And the big thing that I found in terms of the infections in the horse’s uterus is that what we call physical clearance, or just the uterus just getting everything out physically, is the key to preventing infections and helping mares get bred. And my big thing was the fact that at the microscopic level, mucociliary clearance, these little hairs that are on the epithelial cells sweeping out towards the cervix and sweeping everything out of the uterus. That seems to be an important way of the horse to get rid of uterine infections and improve fertility.
Robert Causey: 04:10
So, I love that field. I think it’s fascinating. And anytime you get a chance to look at cilia beating on a little raft when you’re doing embryo transfer, they all swim one way, so the raft sort of goes in circles. So it’s a fun and enjoyable sidebar, I suppose, in veterinary medicine, but I love it.
Colt Knight: 04:34
Well, that’s exactly why we’ve got you on the podcast today is to talk about equine veterinary medicine.
Robert Causey: 04:40
Great.
Colt Knight: 04:42
The great state of Maine has got horse people spread throughout. I’m a former horse person myself, but, you know, all across the country, you can find horse people here and there. And you’re going to the big homestead of horse people next week. Right? You’re going to Lexington.
Robert Causey: 04:59
That’s right. That’s right. There’s a continuing education conference for it’s kind of a dark topic. It’s the necropsying of racehorses or postmortem examination of racehorses.
Colt Knight: 05:11
And that’s the equivalent of autopsy.
Robert Causey: 05:13
Autopsy. Right. Some years ago, for about a year or two, I was doing most of the necropsies or autopsies of animals at the University of Maine, and I found it actually, on the one hand, a very sad thing at times, but on the other hand, a very interesting thing to see the problems that we could solve. If I could just say one thing that lodged in my brain, this poor calf came in, and we were looking at the bones, and there was something completely out of shape with the bones of this little calf, and we had a wonderful histology technologist named Brenda Donna Bean. Donna Bean, and she took a piece of the bone, and she sectioned it, and she stained it.
Robert Causey: 06:01
And I looked at it, and I had no idea what was going on. And we sent it to Tufts, the vet school, down in Massachusetts, and they came back and said, this calf has rickets. And it was a good lesson for me to learn that you could see rickets on histopathology. So interesting stuff.
Colt Knight: 06:21
I went to school at the University of Kentucky.
Robert Causey: 06:24
Uh-huh.
Colt Knight: 06:24
And I was an equine science major. And so I took all the horse classes. In one of our classes, we actually got to go visit the guy’s house who was one of the veterinarians on Secretariat’s necropsy. Oh. And discovered that that horse had the enlarged heart.
Robert Causey: 06:42
The size of the heart.
Colt Knight: 06:43
And to this day, when I teach intro to animal science and I do the horse section, I clear out the front of the auditorium, and I step off Secretariat’s stride length.
Robert Causey: 06:57
Oh, was it? How many strides?
Colt Knight: 07:01
Sorry. I should have looked it up before I went off and spouted my mouth. It’s around 30 feet, or 30 yards. I don’t remember. It’s really long.
Colt Knight: 07:11
It’s the entire length of the front of the auditorium.
Robert Causey: 07:15
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 07:15
And I step it off. I have to look it up to get the exact number, but I’ll step it off. And I was like, that is the length from one foot touching the ground to the next. And then I show a video of Secretariat when they were winning the
Robert Causey: 07:30
The Belmont.
Colt Knight: 07:30
The Triple Crown in the Belmont. Is it the Belmont? I think it’s the Belmont.
Robert Causey: 07:33
It’s the Belmont.
Colt Knight: 07:34
Yeah. Where Secretariat actually leaves the second place horse in the dust. He has got time to open a can, have a drink, smoke a cigarette, whatever, before that other horse even crosses the finish line. It is just an amazing feat what that horse did. And kind of the sad part about it is the second fastest racehorse that ever lived is the one that got second to Secretariat.
Colt Knight: 08:05
So, you know, any other year, that would have been just an amazing horse. Yeah. No one ever remembers his name now.
Robert Causey: 08:13
With our students who are coming in and interested in horses, and, you know, Secretariat was in ’73, I think, way back, and I enjoy showing them that video. Of course, they have the music playing in the video, which you can probably find, but I show them that video, and it is very impressive. And I think it just goes to show how important the cardiovascular system has to be there.
Colt Knight: 08:45
Because if we wanna talk about genetics, none of his offspring ever made a racehorse. One of my buddies bought a Secretariat offspring at the sale barn for $200 one time.
Robert Causey: 08:56
Wow. Yeah. And that is true. There are these things where these animals develop in a particular way, and it has nothing to do with genetics. And who knows what it has to do with it?
Robert Causey: 09:10
It’s all the rolling of the dice and so forth, which is probably perfect for horse racing, because in a sense there’s the huge game of chance there. But they said that Secretariat had, you could probably tell me better, Colt, that a heart, the degree to which his heart was larger than the other typical horses that would have been racing, and his ability to get blood around the muscles, and his ability to have the musculature just so he could gallop and keep that stuff pumping and get the oxygen in. It’s an amazing piece of physiology, of horse physiology. This might be going on a little bit of a tangent, but the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, the father of history, in his history says that the horse is the swiftest animal in the world. And until we came across cheetahs, I think the horse sort of had that record. And it’s wonderful.
Robert Causey: 10:23
Hector, who Achilles took out in Troy and apparently chased around the gates of Troy three times. But Hector, his epithet was horse trainer. And so people that can train horses, and I do not put myself in that category, but people who can train horses, are at a higher level than a lot of us. Certainly not me.
Colt Knight: 10:55
And, you know, Dr. Causey and myself both share a love of horses and being around horses, and I still miss it every day. I always like to say I don’t miss being around horse people because they’re generally crazy, but I do miss being around the horses. Yeah, for sure. And now that I’ve got a young’un running around, the wife is pestering me to build
Robert Causey: 11:19
my And
Colt Knight: 11:21
get some horses in here for the baby to start riding and stuff. So it might be in the future, again, that I’m a horse person.
Robert Causey: 11:31
How old were you when you first got on a horse?
Colt Knight: 11:35
I think I was nine.
Robert Causey: 11:37
Nine. Okay.
Colt Knight: 11:38
And we had milk goats that my dad had purchased to eat the honeysuckle bushes off the side of the hill behind the house. And I remember clearly my dad saying to my mother that if she sold the goats that fall, come spring, we could get Colt a pony. I think within the week, mother had sold the goats, and we had bought a little black stallion pony that was not broke. And I named him Thunder. And you broke it.
Colt Knight: 12:15
And they just threw me on top of that pony, and then I got bucked off and hit the ground. And it was just wash, rinse, and repeat until I had the pony broke. And then I think it was within a couple weeks, mom couldn’t stand it anymore. And we went and bought a buckskin horse named Buck. He was plowing tobacco in Southern West Virginia, and he wasn’t real broke either.
Colt Knight: 12:43
And mom started riding him, and then it wasn’t long before we would go on trail rides. So me on that little pony, mom on that buckskin, and then dad would ride the four-wheeler, and that got old. And so dad went to go look at a big black Tennessee walking horse and came back with two black Tennessee walking horses. And so my mother rode the second walking horse, and then I upgraded to the buckskin horse. And then it kinda got exponentially crazier after that.
Colt Knight: 13:20
We kept getting more and more horses. Then we decided that we needed to train some of the horses, so we went to a horse stable and solicited training advice. Mhmm. I started taking horseback riding lessons.
Robert Causey: 13:34
Mhmm. English or Western?
Colt Knight: 13:36
Oh, English. Yep. And then I took Western, and I got so bored with the Western pleasure lessons, I quit.
Robert Causey: 13:42
So you went back to English then?
Colt Knight: 13:44
I did. Yep. And still to this day, I prefer to ride, like, a 21-inch cutback to a western saddle. Mhmm. I can. I’ll ride either way.
Colt Knight: 13:53
Mhmm. You know? But and, honestly, by the time I was a teenager, we had our own horse stable with 30 or 40 horses. Dad would go to the sale barn. This was back when horse slaughter was still legal, so you could go to the horse sale barn and buy $200 or $300 horses, whatever the meat price was. And we bought a lot of Standardbreds off the track.
Colt Knight: 14:20
And dad would buy those cheap horses, and then I would break them, basically, to ride. And dad always said, oh, don’t worry about him. He could bounce. So I grew up, you know, breaking horses. And then dad would, as soon as they were good enough to ride, sell them for $1,200, $1,500.
Colt Knight: 14:41
So he’d buy a $200 horse. He’d pay me $100 a month to ride them.
Robert Causey: 14:45
I’m trying to work out the finances if they were to your advantage or not. Probably not, I suspect.
Colt Knight: 14:50
Well, child labor laws and such probably weren’t as harsh as they are now. But, I mean, $100 to me back then was a lot of money, so I didn’t have any complaints.
Robert Causey: 15:02
Nice. I
Colt Knight: 15:04
don’t know how we did it. You know, looking back now, we didn’t charge near enough. Because we only charged $150 a month to stable a horse, and my mom cleaned those horse stalls twice a day. That’s just ridiculous. We should have been charging four times that. But, anyway, that’s how I got into it. And then, so I grew up wanting to be a horse person, and I went to the University of Kentucky because that was Lexington, the horse capital of the world.
Colt Knight: 15:33
I got around thoroughbreds and saddlebreds and that kind of thing there. One of our field trips in one of our equine science classes was the Kentucky Horseshoeing School. Mhmm. And I thought, I’m gonna go to Kentucky Horseshoeing School and learn to become a farrier. Mhmm.
Colt Knight: 15:52
And I’m gonna go to graduate school for equine physiology, and I’ll just be the best horseshoer on the face of the planet.
Robert Causey: 15:59
That’s not a bad analysis.
Colt Knight: 16:03
Then one day, I realized that I’m six foot three. And then one thing that you never see from good farriers is you never see a tall farrier.
Robert Causey: 16:15
Or at least not for very long.
Colt Knight: 16:17
No. Your back can’t take it. And then I realized that was not gonna be my path. No. And I switched to cattle when I went to graduate school.
Robert Causey: 16:30
And that’s not a bad choice either way. The thing about horses is they just, from whatever background you come from, they eventually, somehow or other, they just get under your skin.
Colt Knight: 16:46
Was it Winston Churchill that said there’s something about the outside of a horse that makes the inside of a man?
Robert Causey: 16:53
Absolutely. And, again, the Greeks went on about this as well. You can’t see a Greek statue or something up on the Parthenon without horses. So the Greeks understood this, possibly, earlier than a lot of the other civilizations, and maybe the Egyptians also. But, no.
Robert Causey: 17:16
The horses go way, way back, and I think we’ve talked about how horse people can be a little bit crazy. Dare I say that?
Colt Knight: 17:26
I said it already.
Robert Causey: 17:26
You said, yeah. And I think it’s true that, for me, one of the differences between horses and cattle is that with cattle, and you gotta be careful what I say here, but pigs, and for these animals, for me
Colt Knight: 17:44
Cattle is a business. Yeah. Horses are a lifestyle.
Robert Causey: 17:47
Well Is
Colt Knight: 17:47
that what you’re trying to say?
Robert Causey: 17:48
Almost. Almost. Almost. But, also, horses win wars. They transport messages by people.
Robert Causey: 17:55
The whole idea that for want of a nail, a shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, a horse was lost. For want of a horse, everything goes down, and the kingdom was lost, all for the want of a nail. I don’t think you would say that relative to a nice Angus tenderloin or something. You know, it’s
Colt Knight: 18:14
Do you know when there were the most horses on the face of the planet? What were peak numbers for horses, I suspect. In the entire world?
Robert Causey: 18:24
You know, it’s probably right now, but maybe you know better than I do. But we’re
Colt Knight: 18:29
World War I. You said it. You were saying horses win wars. And before we were fully mechanized
Robert Causey: 18:34
Yeah. That’s true.
Colt Knight: 18:35
We were still relying on horses in World War I. Yeah. Yeah. And not so much at the front lines, but transporting stuff to the lines.
Robert Causey: 18:46
Yeah, it was a bit of both.
Colt Knight: 18:47
Messengers and everything. Right?
Robert Causey: 18:49
But also the gunnery horses. I think they would put, like, six horses. I mean, because to fight, to fire
Colt Knight: 18:55
And there’s still cavalry, mounted cavalry in World
Robert Causey: 18:58
War. Well, there was cavalry very early on until they had their charges into the machine guns. They said, this is not going to work. But however, what they needed to do is get, as the war went on, and I’m sort of riffing a little bit on this because I obviously wasn’t there, but they needed to get munitions to the front. They needed to get guns to the front. They needed to get food to the front, and that’s where the horses came in.
Colt Knight: 19:27
So they were used
Robert Causey: 19:30
through the First World War. They were used in the Second World War. The last time I recall them being used was actually in Afghanistan.
Colt Knight: 19:41
Definitely in the late eighties. They were still using them against the Soviets when the Afghans were fighting.
Robert Causey: 19:45
But when they went into, maybe I shouldn’t say that, Tora Bora, the special forces went in on horses a little bit. But, so I think it was 2003 maybe, or 2002, but horses are, people care about them though. They’re not just, and I don’t wanna denigrate the other animals, but somebody riding a horse into battle, it’s not like, you care about the animal even though you’re going into battle. Not that I’ve ever had to do that, thank goodness, but you care about the individual horses. Mhmm.
Robert Causey: 20:22
And it’s a slightly different mindset to, say, cattle or some of the other livestock. And looking through, again, the old literature, you just see this love or respect or interest, at least, in horses in Greece or Egypt or in those parts of the world. So
Colt Knight: 20:45
And you’re gonna have to stop me from going down this rabbit hole, Robert.
Robert Causey: 20:48
I’ll go down it.
Colt Knight: 20:49
But I’m gonna mention it anyway.
Robert Causey: 20:50
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 20:51
War horses were actually a thing. And, you know, we talk about warm-blooded and cold-blooded horses nowadays. Yep. But those warm-blooded horses descended from war horses. Yep.
Colt Knight: 21:05
Those were horses that could charge.
Robert Causey: 21:09
Well, those were the knights in armor. Right?
Colt Knight: 21:11
Yeah. But, I mean, even before we had armor, we had war horses. But, you know, I don’t know what it is. When you get to be a certain age, you start researching history and wars and things, and I went down a big cavalry. Yeah.
Colt Knight: 21:29
Rabbit hole. Yep. And some of the things when you look back at it in modern perspective and you think, like, Napoleonic Wars, the Civil War. Yep. Those people were crazy, lining up at each other and volley firing muskets at one another and charges. Yep.
Colt Knight: 21:50
And, you know, one big line just charging face-on to the enemy. Yep. And you think, that’s just insane. Why would they do that? And the answer was, if you went solitarily or you spread it out any more than one big chunk, the cavalry would just ride through and cut everyone down.
Colt Knight: 22:10
Mounted soldiers with a cavalry saber are way more dangerous than an army full of muskets, which sounds impractical, I guess, until you live it. But even in the Civil War days when we had six-shooters, cap-and-ball revolvers. Colt and Remington both had, you know, Army revolvers in the Civil War and some other manufacturers. And you watch some movies like The Outlaw Josey Wales and stuff, they’re riding into battle with two six-shooters, one in each hand and reins in their mouth. You can’t hit anything with a revolver on horseback charging.
Robert Causey: 22:53
No. But can scare the opposition.
Colt Knight: 22:56
Yeah. It was more of a scare tactic when they did that, but, honestly, the saber was way more deadly than a pistol ever was on horseback.
Robert Causey: 23:06
Interesting. Yeah.
Colt Knight: 23:07
And you think, you know, in our modern brains, that doesn’t make sense, but that was the actual reality. And then they said, and when you read, like, actual cavalry manuals and reports from back in those times, they said the most dangerous cavalry at that time was Europeans that had sharp sabers. And they said that the Americans in the Civil War went towards revolvers because those sabers weren’t sharp. They were stored in a metal scabbard, so every time you pulled them in and out, you dulled the blade. And they just weren’t sharp enough to get the job done.
Colt Knight: 23:53
That’s why they switched over to cap and ball. They said they were actually better fighters than the European cavalry, but they needed that sharp blade. It was way more important than a six-shot revolver to those folks. But, anyway, you let me go down the rabbit hole, and we weren’t supposed to.
Robert Causey: 24:11
Well, the rabbit hole’s interesting.
Colt Knight: 24:17
The other thing that they said was the western saddle.
Robert Causey: 24:20
Go on.
Colt Knight: 24:20
So much farther advanced than everyone else’s cavalry saddles.
Robert Causey: 24:23
That I could believe. Mhmm. That I could believe because we know when you’re riding an English saddle, what do you hang on with? Well, your legs, pretty much. You know?
Robert Causey: 24:33
Meanwhile, you have at least one of the three, if not
Colt Knight: 24:36
two of them. The Mongols invented the stirrup, and that’s how they conquered the world is because they had stirrups on their saddles, and they could run over everyone with their little short horses.
Robert Causey: 24:46
Well, one of the things I wanted to quickly go back to when you were talking about cavalry charge and the sabres. There’s this terrible, I don’t know if it’s a terrible phrase or not, but I’ll say it, and people might recognize it. The Battle of Waterloo was played out on the playing fields of Eton or something like something ridiculous like that, where the Duke of Wellington put his soldiers into squares, and somehow they were able to at least minimize what the French cavalry were doing. Apparently, part of the issue with the French was they never brought up their infantry, but I’m not a historian, so I gotta be careful there. There are times where the cavalry, where infantry discipline can hold things back, but a lot of times when they’ve got horses coming on you with people waving sabres, you
Colt Knight: 25:49
You can go all the way back to Roman battles, you know, in the peak of the Roman Empire, and they would have 10 legions, you know, 10,000 people, and a mounted cavalry of 2,000, or not 2,000, 200, could flank, yeah, 10,000 legionaries
Robert Causey: 26:08
Mhmm.
Colt Knight: 26:08
And win the battle. So, I mean, that’s, I’m not real good at math, but that’s like five to one.
Robert Causey: 26:15
Yeah. And yet, yeah, let me sort of try to… if you can put yourself back into that situation. In that situation, how would you feel about your horse? You know what I mean? It’s gonna keep you safe.
Robert Causey: 26:27
You’re gonna care for that horse, even though you’re gonna go into battle with that horse. Yep. I mean, that is a huge emotional bond.
Colt Knight: 26:35
And it’s not like you just go to the store and buy another one. You raise that horse. You train that horse. You sleep with that horse. That horse is your entire life.
Robert Causey: 26:45
Right.
Colt Knight: 26:46
You live and die by that horse. Yep. And even in the Old West here in the United States, you lived and died by that horse.
Robert Causey: 26:54
Right. And you may or may not be familiar with the Lascaux cave paintings dated back to 10,000 BC, which nowadays is actually not long ago, they’re way back. But some of those earliest or early cave paintings, the most brilliant cave paintings, were paintings of horses and some cattle as well, but horses clearly played a role in those paintings. And I think, and I could be wrong, Colt, so I’m just gonna sort of go out on a limb here, and any archaeologists or whoever the right term is could shoot me down. But in these inner sanctums within Europe, in France, and various places, you look up, and you could see these beautiful frescoes, obviously the wrong word, but these beautiful pictures of horses and various animals.
Robert Causey: 27:52
Sometimes I think that they put those in there not for religious rites or anything like that, but they wanted to put the kids into a nursery, into an environment where they would feel safe, but have something to look at that would keep their attention and sort of relate them to the outside world, but also be safe and looked after, much as we might put pictures of animals into a kid’s bedroom or something like that. So I would hypothesize, perhaps without a shred of real evidence, that some of those paintings were geared towards children and not this religious stuff that people might be pushing or have evidence for. Anyway, cave paintings and horses.
Colt Knight: 28:38
But that love of horses, that innate love of horses has followed us through modern times. So if we take a modern example right now, the Western United States is overrun with what we now call wild horses. Those are not native to the Western United States. Native horses died out in the ice age. Those were brought over by
Robert Causey: 29:03
the
Colt Knight: 29:03
Spanish. Right. And the Spanish highly coveted those horses, and they wouldn’t let the natives work with the horses because, I mean, that was like a high-tech military weapon back then. You wouldn’t let, you know, your subordinates or your enemy have that technology because then they could use it against you. And so they prevented, you know, Native Americans from having the horses.
Colt Knight: 29:35
And there’s some real arguments to say that when the horse escaped Spanish captivity and fell into Native American captivity, they were able to start retaliating.
Robert Causey: 29:50
Mhmm.
Colt Knight: 29:51
You know? And there is no Native American tribe that was able to use the horse better than the Comanche. And they were kind of like some of the last holdouts in the West. Yeah. Because of their fierce fighting ability and horsemanship, they were actually able to ride a horse bareback. Yeah.
Colt Knight: 30:11
Slip under the horse’s neck and fire arrows. So they could ride broadside along a front line of cavalry or frontiersmen, slip under the horse’s neck, and fire arrows. Yep. Can you imagine the skill and bravery of those folks? No.
Colt Knight: 30:32
To be able to do that kinda thing. But, anyway, I digress. I got off another rabbit hole. Modern times, the wild horses, we still really revere those wild horses. And they’re not really wild horses.
Colt Knight: 30:45
They’ve actually done genetic testing of those horses.
Robert Causey: 30:48
And they will come from sort of Spain, I suppose.
Colt Knight: 30:49
No. I mean, most of them are, like, Welsh ponies. Yeah. Yeah. And stuff they used as draft animals in silver mines and things in the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds. There’s not very many Spanish genetics in those horses.
Colt Knight: 31:04
Most of those are just feral horses that have been turned loose over time in the last hundred years.
Robert Causey: 31:08
From Europe, though.
Colt Knight: 31:09
Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, what I’m trying to get at here is horses do tremendous damage to the rangelands of the Western United States. The Western United States did not evolve with those horses in the last ten thousand years. And so their hoof action, native ungulates or ruminant animals can’t graze all the way to the ground.
Colt Knight: 31:37
They have to leave two or three inches just because of the way they naturally graze. Horses can actually grab ahold of the base of the plant and rip it out of the ground and pull the roots out when they graze, or they can just shear it off even. Yep. And so they actually can cause a lot of erosion and different issues. And so that’s something that they’re facing in the Western United States right now in heavy horse areas.
Colt Knight: 32:00
Yep. It’s just tremendous erosion. And so the government decided, because that’s all public land out west, that they were gonna start rounding up the horses. And we call them mustangs now. And I remember when I was a kid, they used to give them away for an adoption fee.
Colt Knight: 32:20
I think it was like $100 or $200. And they would send them to prisons and let inmates break those horses and sell them as riding horses. Is this
Robert Causey: 32:32
is this the Louisiana State Penitentiary Rodeo, or is it
Colt Knight: 32:36
I think there are five or six total prisons in the Western United States that actually break mustangs.
Robert Causey: 32:44
Yeah. I could believe that.
Colt Knight: 32:45
And I got to visit those on one of my trips. Yep. And they say their recidivism rate is way lower. Yeah. On those horse prisons than it is in a regular prison. Yeah.
Colt Knight: 32:56
So they do a great job at that.
Robert Causey: 32:59
Yeah. As you said, there’s something about the outside of a horse that’s good for the inside of a man or something.
Colt Knight: 33:04
And I’ll go down that rabbit hole after I finish this thought. Okay. I got too many horse rabbit holes. I’m sorry. Okay.
Colt Knight: 33:10
But, anyway, then there was a thing. Well, should we just start euthanizing these horses? Mhmm. You know? So they started rounding them up with helicopters and penning them and hauling them off.
Colt Knight: 33:24
And then they, at one point, were sending them to slaughter. At one point, they were euthanizing them. But now there are huge protests. Yeah. And they can’t hardly even round them up anymore because people love horses.
Colt Knight: 33:38
Yeah. And I’m not saying people shouldn’t love horses. But I’m also not saying that they don’t do a tremendous amount of damage to the Western rangelands. It’s a conundrum. Right?
Colt Knight: 33:49
What do we do about that? And I know we don’t have the answer, but that’s just the innate love that human beings have for horses. We still see it even in modern times.
Robert Causey: 34:02
Yeah. Every winter, I’m forced to think about this because the single most important thing for horses to have in the wintertime, in my opinion, is access to fresh water.
Colt Knight: 34:17
And
Robert Causey: 34:20
the one thing that suggests that horses might not be the brightest bulbs in the barn, so to speak, is the fact that they don’t know how to break the ice on a trough to drink it. You know, if it freezes over, the horse sort of figuratively scratches its head and says, okay. Well, I’m just not gonna drink. And so what it makes me wonder, and there might be some wildlife biologists or people much smarter than I am that can talk about this, but as the temperature goes down in the wintertime, horses obviously would migrate south and further south, right up to the point where the water hasn’t frozen, and then in the summertime as it comes back up, they come up and eat in the grasslands and stuff like that, I suppose. But the link between horses and water is a very tight one, I suspect.
Robert Causey: 35:19
And, you know, some of the worst colic cases, not that I’ve seen a huge number of colic cases, but the worst ones I’ve seen have been linked to lack of access to water and impactions.
Colt Knight: 35:30
I was gonna ask you about colic today.
Robert Causey: 35:32
Uh-oh. Okay.
Colt Knight: 35:32
But we’ve gone down a thirty-five-minute, twenty-second rabbit hole on something else. So we’re gonna do a part two and start talking about horse health stuff.
Robert Causey: 35:41
Okay.
Colt Knight: 35:42
So let’s continue this conversation. We had mentioned, you know, that Winston Churchill quote and something that I talk about in class, and we’ve actually done a podcast episode on this already, and I probably shouldn’t bring it up again, but boys’ ranches. So in the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, it was pretty common for ranches that didn’t have help to go and get orphans from the orphanage. You know, boys.
Robert Causey: 36:14
I didn’t know this.
Colt Knight: 36:15
They would get young boys. There was a movie called The Cowboys with John Wayne, where he didn’t have any help, so he went to the local schoolhouse, and in reality, they probably went to the orphanage, not the schoolhouse, and solicited help from young boys. They said, you come live on our ranch. You run our cattle drives. We’re gonna teach you, you know, a trade, and you’ll be the better for it.
Colt Knight: 36:40
Well, in modern times, we still have boys’ ranches, but there’s been a shift. They’re not laborers anymore. We take youth who have been troubled, who are in trouble with the law, who have trouble with authority. Mhmm. That kind of thing. And it’s not just boys anymore.
Colt Knight: 37:00
They do boys and girls now, but we still call them boys’ ranches for historical purposes. But you take, like, a young man from the inner city that probably didn’t have good parents, grew up in a terrible situation, they have no reason to respect adults. Right? Because they’ve been treated like garbage their whole life. They’ve probably never been around responsible adults.
Colt Knight: 37:26
Why would they respect a human being? And in that same respect, why would they respect authority? Why would they respect authority if they don’t respect their guardians or teachers or what have you? You put them on a ranch and you put them on top of a horse, they’re scared to death. They respect that
Robert Causey: 37:49
They’re scared to
Colt Knight: 37:50
death. Twelve-, fifteen-hundred-pound animal.
Robert Causey: 37:52
And yet they love it. At some level, they go ahead.
Colt Knight: 37:56
And so when people ask me about this, I’m like, we are teaching them about respect, and it has nothing to do with human versus horse. It’s like they respect the horse because they’re afraid of it. Mhmm. If you teach them how to get along with the horse, how to work with the horse, ride the horse, utilize the horse, that’s teaching them to respect that horse. Right?
Colt Knight: 38:22
That’s giving them a task and a job to do. And once they learn respect, that respect can then transfer over to people.
Robert Causey: 38:30
I think that’s right. Part of the issue with, say, cattle, and forgive me if I’m… I know you’re also very much a cattle person. You can sort of manhandle cattle. You can put them in a chute, you lower it down.
Colt Knight: 38:46
If you’ve got a mechanical advantage.
Robert Causey: 38:47
If you’ve got a mechanical advantage. But horses have a much longer neck, they have much longer legs, and the things that you can do with cattle you just can’t do with horses. It just doesn’t work. So it’s always a negotiation. It’s always, I can do this much and
Colt Knight: 39:09
Even more so if you’re dealing with mules. I don’t know if you’ve ever done much work with mules.
Robert Causey: 39:14
I have not.
Colt Knight: 39:15
I have not. Anything you do with a mule, you have to make it think it’s its idea. So it’s completely different than working with horses.
Robert Causey: 39:22
Yeah, yeah. I’m not quite sure where that takes us to donkeys, but
Colt Knight: 39:29
That’s where the mules get that from.
Robert Causey: 39:30
That’s where the mules get that from. I remember, I can’t remember how old, I was probably 12 years old, quite young, and a veterinarian named Andrew Chestnut, who was a classmate of my mother’s from the Royal Dick Veterinary College. I went out with him on a first day to, you know, sort of be with a veterinarian, and we arrived. Stop me if I’ve told you this story. We arrived at a farm or a house with a garden, and the lady said to Mr. Chestnut, well, I’m glad you brought some help, and then she left. And so Andrew, we called him Andrew, Andrew Chestnut.
Robert Causey: 40:15
He was a Royal Dick Veterinary College graduate, I think in 1951, or maybe earlier. He created what we call a twitch, which we’re familiar with, a piece of stick with a
Colt Knight: 40:29
So for our non-horse listeners, a twitch is kinda like a, this is gonna sound bad, but it’s almost like a vice grip that you put on the horse’s nose.
Robert Causey: 40:40
It is.
Colt Knight: 40:40
It squeezes the end of the horse’s nose, which causes the horse to release endorphins
Robert Causey: 40:46
Right.
Colt Knight: 40:46
Which basically causes the horse to get high and calm down. That is not the physiological process, but that’s probably the layman’s terms of how to explain that.
Robert Causey: 41:00
And you can go into any tack store, any horse supply, and they’ll probably be willing to sell you a twitch. There’s a… somewhere. And it
Colt Knight: 41:06
squeezes the horse’s snout.
Robert Causey: 41:07
But Andrew Chestnut, for some reason, and I’m surprised he didn’t have one of these, did not have a twitch, and so he found a piece of wood and some baling twine, and we twisted it up, and I held up the little donkey, and we castrated it. Everything went fine. And my mother, who was also a veterinarian, said that donkeys can really be troublesome.
Colt Knight: 41:35
They’re so much smarter than horses, and I think that’s where the trouble lies.
Robert Causey: 41:40
Yeah. Yeah. Because if you’re smaller, you gotta be smarter.
Colt Knight: 41:45
Right. So just think of it. You’re plotting against the horse to outsmart him to get him to bend to your will. Mhmm. Well, the donkey is also smart, so the donkey is counter-plotting against your plotting.
Colt Knight: 42:00
And so the best approach when working with donkeys and mules is to make them think that it’s their idea. So if you come up to a creek and you want the mule or the donkey to cross the creek, with a horse, you would just force the horse to cross the creek.
Robert Causey: 42:15
With some sort of remonstrance, but yes.
Colt Knight: 42:17
I mean, that’s just, you just tell the horse, we’re crossing this creek one way or the other, and the horse will cross the creek. The donkey or the mule will come to the creek, and if it doesn’t wanna cross the creek, it will lay down.
Robert Causey: 42:29
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 42:30
And not that you would do this, but you could whip it, whatever, and it’ll just lay down. Yeah. So it’s a completely different mindset when working with donkeys. No. And
Robert Causey: 42:40
That’s right. But we see this every day when we’re trying to get faculty to do things at the University of Maine, or when they’re trying to get us to do things at the University of Maine, whether you’re an administrator or a faculty member, it’s the same thing. They used to say it’s like herding cats, but it’s probably more like herding donkeys.
Colt Knight: 42:58
It’s kind of that same mentality. Yeah. It really is. Well, Robert, we spent forty-three minutes now.
Robert Causey: 43:06
Well, I enjoyed
Colt Knight: 43:07
it. I don’t know what we’ve talked about this whole time.
Robert Causey: 43:10
Well, maybe we should get back to horses. I can’t remember.
Colt Knight: 43:14
Let’s end this one here. Yes. And then we’re gonna immediately turn around and record another one. Okay. You think it’s an idea?
Colt Knight: 43:25
So for our listeners, stay tuned because we’re gonna have another episode coming up with Dr. Robert Causey. If you are a horse lover, if you have horse stories, feel free to email us at extension.farmcast@maine.edu, and we will continue our horse conversations because there’s nothing that Dr. Causey and I like to do more than to talk about horses. And we haven’t even told any of our old horse war stories about us working horses or breaking horses or riding horses. I could tell you about horses being stuck in quicksand, riding them through rivers. I’ve got just… I used to ride 30 horses a day in high school.
Colt Knight: 44:11
That was my job after school. I got off the bus, went straight to the stable, and stayed at the stable till 10 p.m., and then went home, and then got up at five, 6 a.m. the next day to go to school. So when I say that I used to be a horse person, I am serious. I used to be a horse person.
Robert Causey: 44:31
And the only thing I’ll sort of comment to that is the experience I had was a very English experience where I was told, get on this horse, canter it, let go of the reins, and keep your eyes shut. And see what happens. I used to
Colt Knight: 44:49
have to do that. But we did you? Don’t I don’t think we can. I think we posted. I think we were trying.
Colt Knight: 44:53
Oh. And I’d have to hold my arms out, put the reins down the horse’s neck, close my eyes, and post a right diagonal. Oh. On that horse.
Robert Causey: 45:03
Very good. And
Colt Knight: 45:05
But that’s another story for
Robert Causey: 45:06
For another time.
Colt Knight: 45:07
For another
Robert Causey: 45:08
day. Thank you,
Colt Knight: 45:08
Colt. Yep.